Reply #16: I came to despise Hillary during the health care debacle [View All]

At the time, I was married to a woman who had a catastrophic illness. Fortunately, I had full health insurance. But the experience was a nightmare, because even if you have health insurance, the insurance companies will make your life a nightmare. Keeping up with the paperwork was like a full time job, which I didn't have time for, and despite having full insurance the insurance companies wrecked our credit rating. We ended up containing the damage by paying out of pocket.

One day, our company human resources people sat us down and told us that they would have to change insurance plans. They told us how much they were paying beyond our contributions. I was floored because the combined yearly premiums were actually more than my then wife's medical costs. If she had the most expensive medical problems in the smallish company, but were still less than the premiums, what on earth were they doing with the premiums?

I also have a relative who is a doctor and several friends were newly minted doctors, and they were all experiencing the disaster of the direct managerial takeover of the medical system by the insurance companies. The health insurance companies were just then invading hospitals, hmos, practices and destroying the system.

That year, the Clintons came in on a wave of disgust about the health insurance companies. The first bizarre thing they did was put an unelected person, Hillary, in charge of this huge national crisis. What on earth were they doing? What possible expertise could she have in managing this catastrophe?

Then, Hillary began creating her proposal by entering into secret meetings with the insurance companies. By and large, Hillary excluded doctors groups and patients groups. Hillary established the precedent by which Dick Cheney developed energy policy behind closed doors with corporate interests in secret when she developed health care policy behind closed doors with corporate interests in secret.

The obvious and predictable result was a proposal for even greater catastophe. Although the Republican attack machine went into high gear to smear her plan and attacked it for all the wrong reasons, her plan was in fact a corporate monstrosity that would have reduced the health care system to rubble and killed hundreds of thousands of people.

This debacle affected me personally. Moreover, by failing so spectacularly, she effectively put health care reform off the political agenda for a generation. How many hundreds of thousands have died or suffered because of her idiocy, secrecy and arrogance?

I came to forgive and admire Bill for all the good policies he pursued and the results he achieved. But Hillary showed several fundamental personal attributes at that time, and her support of the war (STILL!) shows that these have not basically changed:

She is a creature of corporate interests;

She is too arrogant and certain of her own brilliance to listen to the advice of broad public constituencies;

She is fundamentally incompetent;

She is secretive;

She has no core values, but instead is mainly concerned with getting, keeping and exercising power, but without, say Johnson's or FDR's desire to get power to use power for the public good.

Hillary will never get my vote, ever. I always vote straight Democratic tickets, but when she runs in NY, for the Senate line, I vote Green. I will vote for any other Democrat in 2008, but if Hillary is the nominee, I will vote Green.